1. James Alison, Faith
Beyond
Resentment; in ch. 5, "Moving on: the exilic transformation of
anger into love," he undertakes a wholistic reading of Ezekiel as
exemplifying
the exilic transformation, one brought to fulfillment in the
eucharistic
experience. The "dry bones" passage is mentioned on page 116.

Ezekiel, prophesying about 592 to 570 B.C.E., during the
Babylonian
Exile, makes a statement about sacrifice that is simultaneously full of
insight and permeated with a sense of dread concerning Israel’s
history.
Ezekiel, like Jeremiah, addressed himself to the horrible practice of
the
sacrifice of children (see Ezek 16:15-21; 20:25-31; 23:36-39; Jer 7:31;
19:5; 32:35). One can only conclude that the desperate people of
Jerusalem
and its environs resorted to an age-old practice, child sacrifice,
during
the crisis of the final days of Jerusalem before the Babylonian
conquest
in 597 B.C.E. and the quelling of the rebellion in 586 B.C.E. when the
Temple was destroyed and many more captives were deported. It is well
known
that in tunes of crisis we tend to fall back on primitive strands in
our
personal or social makeup. That the Judeans did this, there can be no
doubt,
both by the witness of Ezekiel and Jeremiah and the widely documented
practice
of the offering of human victims, including children, in the Middle
East,
Africa, and elsewhere in the world. In a time of crisis, of course, if
the sacred social system does not have a pool of victims to sacrifice
or
scapegoat, such as the Aztecs maintained, then those who are
simultaneously
most valuable and vulnerable must be given up to the god, namely, the
children
of the community.

Reflections and Questions

1. Where does one find a valley of dry bones? Besides in a prophetic
vision, one could in 'real life' find a valley of dry bones in the
refuse
piles of sacrificial cults. Could that be the background for Ezekiel's
vision? It's not just any pile of bones that is revived but the bones
of
sacrificial victims?

2. The corporate nature of the multitude of bones is important here.
The Lord is speaking to the "whole house of Israel." What we might
deepen,
from a Girardian perspective, is the nature of death and life in the
context
of community. The way of founding human community since the foundation
of the world is the way of the sacrificial cult(ure) that leaves the
dead,
dried up bones of those whom we have slain. When God breathes the Holy
Spirit on them, reviving their community around the divine power of
life,
there is finally a new basis for community itself, one based on life
not
death.

As a prophecy of the Resurrection, Ezekiel 37 highlights the
corporate
dimension. When God raises Jesus from the dead, it isn't simply the
raising
of one human body. It represents the resurrection, the creation out of
nothing, of a new foundation for human community. The Resurrection must
also be the beginning of the Church, the new body of Christ, a human
community
founded on something other than the scapegoating mechanism which leaves
nothing but dead and dried up bones in its wake.

Romans 8:6-11

Exegetical Note

The translation of 8:6 could be more straightforward than in the
NRSV,
where it is, "To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the
mind
on the Spirit is life and peace." The Greek is simply: to gar
phronema
tes sarkos thanatos, to de phronema tou pneumatos zoe kai eirene. phronema,
"mind,"
is not the more common nous (used by Paul to designate "mind"
other than here in ch. 8, at Rom. 1:28; 7:23, 25; 11:34; 12:2; 14:5).
And
it is in a genitive construction with "flesh" and "Spirit": "mind of/in
the flesh" and "mind of/in the Spirit." Finally, a remarkable fact
about
this Greek 'sentence' is that there is no verb! It is simply a bunch of
nouns strung together with connective words. It is apparently Paul's
most
boiled down statement of the two kind of existences open to humankind,
so that the most literal translation would simply be the almost
syllogistic:
"For thinking in flesh, death; but thinking in spirit, life and peace."

In his TDNT article on eirene, "peace," Werner
Foerster
has this helpful summary of Rom. 8:6:

Paul is telling us what the striving of the flesh and the
striving
of the spirit objectively signify and finally lead to, namely, death on
the one side and eirene on the other. He bases the first part
of
the verse on v. 7. The striving of the flesh is enmity against God and
can only lead to death. He is not thinking in terms either of a
harmonious
disposition of soul or of peace with God. As zoe ["life"] and thanatos
["death"] are modes of existence which will be revealed as such
eschatologically,
so it is with eirene, the parallel of zoe. (TDNT,
II:
414)

This one verse is a terse statement of the Girardian view put forward
in
these reflections: there are only two "modes of existence," one of
human
fallenness into sin that ultimately leads to death, and one of divine
grace
that ultimately leads to life. The Girardian anthropology offers an
hypothesis
as to how human culture is founded in collective murder and so never is
able to ultimately lead us away from death. God's act of salvation in
Jesus
Christ is to submit to those very powers of death at the foundation of
our human worlds and show them in the Resurrection to be ultimately
impotent
in the face of God's power of life in the Spirit.

Resources

1. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred
Violence; pp. 148-149 elaborate on "the flesh" in Romans
8:1-17.
Earlier in pp. 120-129, Hamerton-Kelly argues that "the ultimate
horizon
of these symbols is the whole human race, but the specific instance in
his experience is Judaism" (120). Romans opens with an indictment of
Gentile
idolatry, 1:18-32; but this is almost more of a rhetorical move to
catch
his Jewish audience in their own form of idolatry:

Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you
judge
others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself,
because
you, the judge, are doing the very same things. You say, "We know that
God's judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with
truth."
(Rom. 2:1-2)

This sets Paul up for later using his own Jewish faith as the prime
example
of life "according to the flesh," which, by Hamerton-Kelly's Girardian
reading, means life under the cultural influence of the Sacred. Of
Paul's
personalized expression about this life in the flesh in Romans 7,
Hamerton-Kelly
writes:

Paul describes, therefore, a sociological phenomenon of
deviated
purpose rather than a psychological phenomenon of the weak will. The
deviation
of purpose is caused by the social dynamics of the Sacred rather than
the
psychological dynamics of frustration. The self that is both "I" and
"my
flesh" is the culturally embedded self, and in Paul's case, a Jewish
self.
As such it is enmeshed in a social nexus that turns good will to evil
action.
In this nexus a robust will produces well-intentioned actions that miss
the mark.

The prime example of this in Paul's life is his persecution of the
Christians,
which was, as far as we know, not an act of uncontrollable rage, but
rather
the rational pursuit of a religious goal according to the ethos of his
Jewish community. In doing this he really did not know that he was
doing
evil by doing good, because sin deceived him through the Law, with the
result that he saw religious envy as divine obligation. Insofar as he
wanted
to be doing God's will, he could be said to have rejoiced in God's Law
with his mind (Rom 7:22; cf. Rom 10:2), but insofar as he tried to do
that
will through the Jewish community, he found his desire thwarted. Sacred
violence turned the Mosaic Law (heteros nomos -- Rom 7:23, cf.
Rom
13:8) into the enemy of his desire to do the Law of God; it made the
Law
serve the opposite of its intended purpose. (p. 148)

Life "in the flesh" is fallen human cultural life, for which the
mechanisms
of sacred violence always work their control in ways that lead to
death.
Life "in the Spirit" brings the possibility of redeemed human culture,
a renewed life in community based in forgiveness rather than sacred
violence.

Link to an excerpt of Hamerton-Kelly's full argument
regarding
Paul's language of "The
Law and the Flesh," especially in Romans 7-8.

Reflections and Questions

1. Basically, everything we have said about this passage means that
our reading of Ezekiel 37 in a corporate fashion applies here, as well.
"Flesh" and "Spirit" describe two opposing corporate, communal
realities.
One is based in death and the other in life. "Flesh" is human community
based on the scapegoating mechanism, and "Spirit" enlivens those human
communities founded on the Risen Victim of our scapegoating mechanism.
The talk of "body" for Paul thus presumes corporate bodies, at least in
the background, when not in the foreground (e.g., "body of Christ").
Even
when Paul is talking of our "individual" bodies, he is never conceiving
them, as we have come to do, as bodies isolated from their
relationships
to corporate bodies. (In English, "corporate" and "corporeal" are
related
through the common Latin root
corpus, "body.")

John 11:1-45

Exegetical Notes

1. There is a translation problem crucial to interpreting this
passage.
I want to present Gil Bailie's interpretation as the best
solution
to this problem, but let me begin with a third party description of the
problem and its history of suggested solutions. Gail R O'Day,
in
her New Interpreter's Bible commentary, outlines the exegetical
problem in John 11:33-35:

These verses are among the most difficult to understand in
the Gospel. From the earliest patristic interpreters of this text,
commentators
have struggled to interpret the words about Jesus' emotions in these
verses.
This difficulty has even influenced the way v. 33 is translated. The
differences
between the NIV and the NRSV translations are instructive in this
regard.
The NIV translates the verb
enebrimesato as "deeply moved," the
NRSV as "greatly disturbed." The NIV translates the verb etaraxen
as "troubled," the NRSV as "deeply moved." The two translations suggest
that the verbs are synonymous and that they have to do with the depths
of Jesus' compassion (esp. "deeply moved"). However, they are more
interpretation
than translation, because the Greek verbs do not have these meanings.
The
first verb (embrimaomai) connotes anger and indignation, not
compassion.
In its LXX and other NT usages, it has this meaning consistently (e.g.,
Dan 11:30 LXX; Matt 9:30; Mark 1:43; 14:5). The primary meaning of the
second verb is "agitated" or "troubled" (tarasso; the NIV is
more
accurate here) and is used here to underscore the intensity of Jesus'
emotion.

The NIV and the NRSV thus tend to sentimentalize Jesus' emotions
in
v. 33, turning them from anger to compassion. This tendency to soften
Jesus'
emotions is evident in the very earliest manuscripts as well. P45,
for example, avoids the direct statement that Jesus was indignant ("He
was disturbed in spirit like being angry"). Interestingly, German
translations
of this text, following Luther's initial translation, tend to render
the
verbs as verbs of anger.

The evidence of the Greek text, then, seems incontestable that
Jesus
is described as angry in v. 33. But why do the tears of Mary and the
"Jews"
arouse Jesus' anger and indignation? (NIB, IX:690)

In a situation that seems to call for sympathy, the evangelist John has
Jesus clearly angry, something that apparently makes us so
uncomfortable
in our picture of Jesus that modern translators simply change the
emotions
to better suit our comfortable pictures of Jesus. It's easier than
trying
to explain why Jesus would be angry.

Commentators who are obliged to pay attention to the Greek original,
however, have had to try their hand at offering such explanations. Here
is O'Day's summary of those attempts:

The main explanations offered for Jesus' anger conclude
that
Jesus was angry at the unbelief of Mary and the Jews
(1) or that Jesus was angry at the evidence of the power of
sin
and death in the world. (2) There are
two
significant variations on the latter suggestion. Chrysostom suggested
that
Jesus was angry at the prospect of his own death and his upcoming
battle
with Satan, much as he was in the Garden of Gethsemane in Mark (14:33).
Barrett adds to Chrysostom's suggestion, seeing in Jesus' anger
evidence
of the theme of the messianic secret. In addition to being troubled by
the approaching end of his ministry, Jesus is angry because he feels
pressed
to reveal himself through the raising of Lazarus.
(3) (NIB, IX:690)

O'Day herself, though, is not satisfied with these answers and so
offers
one of her own:

None of the above suggestions resolves all of the issues in
v. 33. To say that Jesus is angry at death, either his own or the power
of death in general, is to overlook the powerful evidence of vv. 4, 15,
25-26, and 40 that Jesus understands Lazarus's death as a joyous
occasion
for the revelation of the glory of God and Jesus' power as the
resurrection
and the life. The suggestion that Jesus is angry at the lack of faith
fits
the context better. Jesus may be angry that the "Jews," those who are
not
his own, have intruded onto the scene. The introductory verses
repeatedly
stress the intimacy of Jesus' relationship with Lazarus and his sisters
(vv. 3, 5, 11). Jesus rejoiced that Lazarus's death would be an
occasion
for his disciples to come to faith (v. 15). Perhaps this miracle was to
be for his intimates, much like the foot washing in 13:1-20, and his
last
words in 14:1-17:26 are only for "his own." Now Jesus is angry that it
must be shared with those who do not believe that he is the Son of God.
(NIB, IX:690)

Before we move on with Gil Bailie's suggestion, we should mention that
one of the troublesome words of v. 33, embrimaomai, is repeated
in v. 38: "Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It
was
a cave, and a stone was lying against it."

2. Bailie's suggestion relies on a second exegetical note from vv.
33-38.
It's one that O'Day fails to mention, and so I'll rely on another
"third-party"
commentator to notice for us. Brian Stoffregen, in his weekly
commentary on the RCL Gospel Lessons (posted on Mark Hoffman's
"Crossmarks"
webpage), writes of v. 35, "Jesus wept":

This is the only occurrence of dakruo ("weep") in
the
NT. It is a different word used of Mary or the Jews "weeping" (klaio)
[e.g.,
in v. 33]. Does John mean to imply that Jesus' crying was somehow
different than the weeping (wailing?) of the others? (webpage
for Lent 5A)

Stoffregen does not offer an answer to this question. Gil Bailie,
however,
answers in the affirmative -- yes, John means to imply that Jesus'
shedding of tears, dakruo, is different from what is meant by klaio
in describing what it is that Mary and the Jews were doing. Bailie
suggests
that klaio points to the ritual wailing that was common in such
circumstances. Klaio is the more common word for "weeping" in
the
NT, and it by no means has the connotations of ritual wailing wherever
it is used. But John gives us the important clue by choosing for Jesus'
shedding of tears a word that is not used anywhere else in the entire
New
Testament (nine times in the LXX). That Jesus' weeping (dakruo)
in v. 35 might be more of a spontaneous nature can then be contrasted
with
the intentionality of weeping (klaio) implied in v. 31: "The
Jews
who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly
and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going
to
the tomb to weep there." Do they seek to join Mary in going to the tomb
and see if they feel like crying with her? No, v. 31 is about the more
intentional "weeping" of ritual wailing, isn't it? Jesus encounters
them
all carrying out the ritual wailing in v. 33 and gets angry with them.
How this difference in "weeping" suggests an answer to the problem of
Jesus’
anger is what is outlined below under resources.

Bailie's suggested answer to the problem of Jesus' anger has to do
with
an anthropological understanding of the role of death in human culture.
Ritual wailing is related to the catharsis of the sacrificial cults. It
can be a helpful catharsis for the grieving family, but it can also be
the occasion for whipping up a sacrificial catharsis, especially a
revenge-oriented
one. Jesus, with his own death in mind, needed to guide his followers
away
from such a reaction to his death. The empty tomb would also prevent
followers
from rallying around the place of the corpse -- though the bitter irony
of the Crusades is that a thousand years later the Church was able to
rally
a sacred violence around freeing the Holy Sepulcher from the
"infidels."
There is no Holy Sepulcher! The tomb is empty! Bailie uses the example
of Slobodan Milosevic rallying the Serbian people around the 600
year-old
corpse of a fallen Serbian general in order to whip up revenge against
their enemies -- known these days as "ethnic cleansing."

It may seem extreme to use such examples in connection with the
'natural'
death of a friend. But to write off Bailie's answer risks
underestimating,
I think, the hold that death has on us at the foundations of our human
cultures. Our exposition of Romans 8:6-11 above suggests that Paul held
to a similar anthropological thinking in terms of life in the flesh
always
proving itself to ultimately be about death.

Modern thinkers -- philosophers such as Heidegger, sociologists such
as Ernst Becker -- have shown us how much we are "beings-toward-death."
Girard gives us the anthropological explanation of how the powerful
catharses
around death are at the foundations of culture, and thus as a driving
force
behind our human experience. Moreover, Girard's faith takes him beyond
where Heidegger would dare to go, such that Jesus can be seen to offer
us freedom from our "Being-toward-death" into a "Being-toward-life."
Jesus,
in John 11, is concerned before his passion to help his followers to be
prepared for the founding of God's culture, founded in the boundless
life
of the Resurrection. Living in God's culture begun at the Resurrection,
our "Being-toward-" can undergo the fundamental transformation from
death
to life. "Eternal life" isn't just something that happens to us after
we
die. It is something that happens to us the instant we begin to
experience
the Resurrection and begin the journey of becoming
"Beings-toward-life."
John 11 gives us a story about Jesus' warm-up exercise to experiencing
the Resurrection. It is a coaxing preparation for being able to live in
the light of the Resurrection.

2. Link to a sermon entitled "A
Lesson
in Facing Death," which uses Bailie's interpretation to tell
the story from the point of view of one of Lazarus' friends, a friend
who
also happened to be a paid mourner. He testifies to how Jesus that day
began to teach him a different response to death. The 2002 version (the
original version was preached in 1996) brings in the challenge of not
responding
in vengeance to the perpetrators of the September 11 terrorism. It also
uses John's text within the monolog to help tell the story (so that I
didn't
have to read the Gospel separately first).

3. In 2011 what struck me about this text is Jesus' words a couple
weeks later on Holy Thursday, namely, the his disciples would do
greater works than him. Raise people from the dead? Do we ever do that?
No, but in John's Gospel Jesus' works are signs of the New Creation
that invite believers to work in the New Creation, which then leads to
potential for much to be accomplished on the side of life. Link to a sermon titled "Doing Greater Works."

1. v. 16: Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow
disciples,
"Let us also go, that we may die with him." Does Thomas' bold statement
also express the kind of orientation around death that Jesus is trying
to lead them away from in this story? Bailie's link with the events of
1989 in Kosovo are all too real today, too. The same person who used a
600 year-old corpse to whip the Serbs into a vengeful frenzy is now on
trial for crimes against humanity. Thomas' call to martyrdom might be
more
in that vein.

2. Compare John 9 and 11. In 9 the physical miracle comes at the
outset,
and all that follows is a spinning out on the meaning of blindness as
something
much deeper than the lack of physical eyesight. In John 11, the lesson
involving the real power of life over death comes as a long prelude to
the physical miracle. John uses two differing narrative approaches to
show
us the real meaning behind these miracles. In the first Jesus begins by
healing a man born blind and then the rest of the story, primarily
through
the Pharisees and scribes, shows us the blindness of humanity since we
were born, i.e., our blindness to the expulsion mechanism on which our
human community is based. The healing of the man born blind is a "sign"
of the deeper healing of blindness which Jesus came to bring us. By
contrast
in John 11, the physical miracle climaxes the narrative, with its most
vivid sign coming in Jesus' final words: "Unbind him, and let him go."
That is a 'sign' for what Jesus has been trying to do for all his
followers
in all that has led up to this moment. Jesus has been trying to unbind
us from death's hold on our lives.

3. Does Bailie's emphasis on teaching us how to face death totally
spiritualize
this story out of being a miracle? I don't think it is his intention. I
find his take very helpful, and so I'll speak for myself in reflecting
on the miraculous nature of raising Lazarus.

First, we might ask more generally, what was the point of Jesus
doing
miracles? In what did the miracles consist? More to the point: when
Jesus
performed a miracle, which was the more important "miracle": the
suspending
of physical laws of nature that worked a miraculous change in the
physical
world, or the effect which that "miracle" had in changing human hearts?
Which is more significant: working a dramatic change in the course of
natural
events, or working a dramatic change in human hearts?

I ask these questions because that's what comes up for me in the
point
I think Gil is trying to make about the Lazarus story. His point isn't
to debunk this dramatic change in the course of nature, the
resuscitation
of a corpse. I don't think he's even trying to say that that didn't
happen.
What I think he is trying to say, and what is important to me about
such
miracles, is the miraculous change it can make in us. Jesus
wasn't
there to simply wow the crowd with a few magic tricks. He was there to
invite them into a whole new orientation to life and death, a miracle
of
human transformation that wouldn't be complete until his own death and
resurrection. Jesus was there to confront their old ways of facing
death
and to begin to give them a new way. To the extent that he, along with
the Holy Spirit, is actually able to give us that new orientation, that
for me is the real miracle. It's not that the raising of Lazarus didn't
happen or that we should debunk it; it's that there's something even
more
important going on, a potential change in the human heart. In other
words,
if we stop with only the literal raising of Lazarus, we still miss the
most important miracle that may happen here, something that even goes
beyond
the resuscitation, that dramatic change in the course of natural
events.

What could be more meaningful than the resuscitation of a dead
friend?
Lazarus would still die a death of his earthly body some day. Jesus was
saving him from that only for the time-being. But what if, in the
meantime,
Lazarus' new lease on living could be transformed into an existence
that
is wholly for life? That's what I think John's Jesus means by "eternal
life." And it is a "realized eschatology" to the extent that one can
immediately
begin to experience this "eternal life" the moment one believes in
Jesus,
who is the resurrection and the life. Martha responds to Jesus about
resurrection
in terms of something in the future, "on the last day." Jesus further
responds
to her in the present tense, "I am...."

4. I think there's an indication for this approach to miracles in
the
miracle stories in general. One of the most famous, for example, is the
healing of the paralytic, where his friends lower him through the
ceiling.
Before healing the man, Jesus makes a big deal about forgiveness. The
Pharisees
and scribes put up a stink about not being able to offer someone
forgiveness.
To which Jesus basically responds, "Which is more difficult, forgiving
this man's sins, or telling him to get up and walk." When our thinking
is oriented toward the magical, toward a dramatic intervention in the
course
of natural events, we say, "Getting up and walking, of course!" But is
it really? Isn't the change that forgiveness can work on the human
heart
the even tougher miracle? I think that the two go together. Jesus
literally
healed the lame man, but he also forgave his sins. And I think that
Jesus
felt the latter to be the more important point. He did one with the
other
in the hopes that people could "get around" the one in order to really
see the miraculous nature of the other, too.

John's whole approach to miracles is as "signs." These signs had
little
value on their own. The point is not that I doubt whether the signs
happened,
which I don't generally, but to go beyond these "signs" to see the more
important thing that they are pointing to, most often a potentially
miraculous
healing of the human heart.

5. What kind of hold does death have on our lives? The answer, at
least
in part, follows after this story in the plot against Jesus by the
Jewish
Council. Only five verses after the conclusion of the Lazarus story, we
have the infamous Caiaphas principle which so poignantly expresses the
Girardian thesis about scapegoating: "You do not understand that it is
better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the
whole
nation destroyed." This is the kind of death which underlies all our
other
experiences of death because we are thoroughly cultural beings. A
collective
murder is at the foundation of our culture and so colors our experience
of any death. There is no such thing as natural death in the sense that
we are not natural beings; we are cultural beings. We can never drop
the
membrane of culture through which we experience everything.

6. Still, how does one spin out examples of this and help make it
real
for the congregation? What exactly is the difference between honest
grief
at the loss of a loved one and the death-oriented aspects of our
culture?
It is not easy to sort these things out.

Let me begin with the example of racism as understood as a systemic
phenomena. So understood racism is much more than personal prejudice.
It
is even more than instances of white people holding power over people
of
color. White Racism is the several centuries old practice of evolving
all
societal institutions to privilege white people over all others. Thus,
racism is not just a matter of stopping acts of oppressive power. It is
also white people learning to see and give up the privilege that has
been
theirs over these long centuries. It is a way of seeing the world which
sees racism as completely entwined in all the institutions of our
culture
and society. When I, as a white person, am able to obtain a certain
job,
and live in a certain home, etc., how much is 'because I deserve it'
and
how much is due to the privilege built into the fabric of white racist
society?

Girardian anthropology works a similar perception of all human
cultures
bound up with death -- with only the crucified and risen Christ able to
meaningfully proclaim to us, "Unbind them!" In fact, the foregoing
analysis
of racism makes perfect sense within the Girardian analysis of all
human
cultures as being sacrificial. White racism is simply the most virulent
contemporary form of that sacrificial logic which privileges the
dominant
group over the subordinate group. It is propped up by the same kind of
myths of sacred violence that have existed throughout history in order
to keep us blind to our sacrificial victims as victims. It's not that
other
cultures don't have their own forms of sacrificial logic behind them.
It's
that white culture has had the wealth, technological firepower, and
political
machinery to superimpose its logic of sacrifice on everyone else with
whom
it comes into contact. And the amount of death it yields has been truly
staggering.

7. More down-to-earth examples can be seen in music and other items
of popular culture. Our heroes are generally involved in death. In our
age of nihilism, fringe-music movements like Heavy Metal, or Shock
Rock,
are explicitly all about death. Our movies are increasingly fascinated
with death. Even the more innocuous romantic songs generally have a
theme
behind that boils down to, 'I can't live without you.' Is that more
about
life or death? Our romantic flings make us 'feel alive,' but what is
that
really all about if, when they come to an end, we just want to die?

8. Finally, the most gripping current example continues to be our
response
to the terrible sacred violence of 9/11. Is our grief and sorrow mostly
about honest grief and sorrow? Or is about rallying ourselves for our
own
return version of sacred violence?

James Alison, as should be no surprise to readers of these
pages,
has penned an eloquent description of how such grief can come into the
satanic service of sacred violence. I leave you, then, with an excerpt
of some reflections of his on our response to 9/11, offered in a talk
given
at Downside Abbey, Bath, England, Nov. 3, 2001, entitled "Contemplation
in a World of Violence," now also published as ch. 1 of On
Being Liked:

First of all, I would like to take us all back in our
memories
to the afternoon of September 11th — the afternoon, that is, for those
of us who were on this side of the Atlantic. What I want to suggest to
you is that we were all summoned to participate in something satanic.
Now,
by “satanic” I don’t mean an over-the-top figure of speech, but
something
very specific, with very specific anthropological content, something
whose
very ability to be decoded by us is a sign of its failing
transcendence.
This is what I mean: some brothers of ours committed simple acts of
suicide
with significant collateral murder, meaning nothing at all. There is no
meaning to the act of destruction caused by hijacking planes full of
people
and crashing them into buildings. It is not an act creative of anything
at all, any more than any other suicide is a creative act.

But immediately we began to respond, and our response is to create
meaning.
It is our response that I am seeking to examine. Our response was
sparked
by two particular forces: the locations chosen for the suicide with
collateral
murder — places symbolic of power, wealth and success (never mind that
many of those killed were neither powerful, wealthy or successful); and
the omnipresence in the cities in question, and particularly New York,
of rolling cameras and a hugely powerful media network which enabled a
significant proportion of the planet to be sucked in to spectating from
a safe distance. An already mimetic center, drawing more attention than
ever towards itself, on that day became virtually inescapable.

As we were sucked in, so we were fascinated. The “tremendum et
fascinosum,”
as Otto described the old sacred, took hold of us. Furthermore, we did
not come to the spectacle with fresh eyes, as to something entirely
new.
We came with a script given us by a thousand movies and conspiracy
novels
of the Robert Ludlum / Tom Clancy genre. It is not original to have
noticed
that the second plane actually crashing into the tower looked less
convincing
than it would have done in a film. A film would certainly have made it
look much better, produced tension, given it an air of deliberation,
rather
than that almost whimsical video-game appearance from off the side of
our
screens. It is not that what we saw was “like a film.” We have been
taught
by films and books, themselves borrowing from and playing to
ritualistic
constructions of meaning, to see what we saw, and to react as we
reacted.
Like the novelists and the film directors, we know the ritual.

And immediately the old sacred worked its magic: we found
ourselves
being sucked in to a sacred center, one where a meaningless act had
created
a vacuum of meaning, and we found ourselves giving meaning to it. All
over
London I found that friends had stopped work, offices were closing
down,
everyone was glued to the screen. In short, there had appeared,
suddenly,
a holy day. Not what we mean by a holiday, a day of rest, but an older
form of holiday, a being sucked out of our ordinary lives in order to
participate
in a sacred and sacrificial centre so kindly set up for us by the
meaningless
suicides.

And immediately the sacrificial center began to generate the sort
of
reactions that sacrificial centers are supposed to generate: a feeling
of unanimity and grief. Let me make a parenthesis here. I am not
referring
to the immediate reactions of those actually involved — rescue
services,
relatives, friends, whose form of being drawn in was as a response to
an
emergency and a family tragedy. I am referring to the rest of us. There
took hold of an enormous number of us a feeling of being pulled in,
being
somehow involved, as though it was part of our lives. Phrases began to
appear to the effect that “We’re all Americans now” — a purely
fictitious
feeling for most of us. It was staggering to watch the togetherness
build
up around the sacred center, quickly consecrated as Ground Zero, a
togetherness
that would harden over the coming hours into flag waving, a huge
upsurge
in religious services and observance, religious leaders suddenly taken
seriously, candles, shrines, prayers, all the accoutrements of the
religion
of death. The de facto President fumbling at first, a moment of
genuinely
humble, banal, humanity, then getting his High Priestly act together by
preaching revenge at an Episcopal Eucharist. The Queen “getting right”
what she “got wrong” last time there was a similar outbreak of sacred
contagion
around an iconic cadaver [Princess Diana?], by having the American
National
Anthem played at Buckingham Palace.

And there was the grief. How we enjoy grief. It makes us feel
good,
and innocent. This is what Aristotle meant by catharsis, and it has
deeply
sinister echoes of dramatic tragedy’s roots in sacrifice. One of the
effects
of the violent sacred around the sacrificial center is to make those
present
feel justified, feel morally good. A counterfactual goodness which
suddenly
takes us out of our little betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy
consciences.
And very quickly of course the unanimity and the grief harden into the
militant goodness of those who have a transcendent object to their
lives.
And then there are those who are with us and those who are against us,
the beginnings of the suppression of dissent. Quickly people were
saying
things like “to think that we used to spend our lives engaged in gossip
about celebrities’ and politicians’ sexual peccadillos. Now we have
been
summoned into thinking about the things that really matter.” And
beneath
the militant goodness, suddenly permission to sack people, to leak out
bad news and so on, things which could take advantage of the unanimity
to avoid reasoned negotiation.

And there was fear. Fear of more to come. Fear that it could be me
next
time. Fear of flying, fear of anthrax, fear of certain public buildings
and spaces. Fear that the world had changed, that nothing would ever be
the same again. Fear and disorientation in a new world order. Not an
entirely
uncomfortable fear, the fear that goes with a satanic show. Part of the
glue which binds us into it. A fear not unrelated to excitement.

What I want to suggest is that most of us fell for it, at some
level.
We were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance for a huge outbreak of
meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we belonged to
something
bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and solidarity. What I
want
to suggest is that this, this delight in being given meaning, is
satanic.
When we are baptized, we, or our Godparents on our behalf, renounce
Satan
and all his vain pomps and empty works. And here we were, sorely
tempted
at least to find ourselves being sucked up into believing in just such
an empty work and pomp. A huge and splendid show giving the impression
of something creative of meaning, but in fact, a snare and an illusion,
meaning nothing at all, but leaving us prey to revenge and violence,
our
judgments clouded by satanic righteousness.

When I say satanic, I mean this in two senses, for we can only
accurately
describe the satanic in two senses. The first sense is the sense I have
just described: the fantastic pomp and work of sacrificial violence
leading
to an impression of unanimity, the same lie from the one who was a
murderer
and liar from the beginning [John 8:44], the same lie behind all human
sacrifices, all attempts to create social order and meaning out of a
sacred
space of victimization.

But the second sense is more important: the satanic is a lie that
has
been undone. It has been undone by Jesus’s going to death, exploding
from
within the whole world of sacrifice, of religion and culture based on
death,
and showing it has no transcendence at all. Jesus says in Luke’s Gospel
(and it is the title of Girard’s
recent
book) “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” This is the
solemn
declaration of the definitive loss of transcendence of the satanic
show:
we no longer have to believe it, we no longer have to act driven by its
compulsions. It has no power other than the power we give it. The pomp
has nothing to do with heaven. It has nothing to do with God.

And this of course was apparent to us as well even, and perhaps
especially,
in our secularity. There was the sort of sacred grief I described, but
there were also, mixed up with it, genuine outbursts of compassion:
wonder
at the two who jumped out of the building holding hands; a warmth of
heart
as the news came out of the messages of simple love bereft of any huge
religious significance left on answering machines. At the same time as
the sacred violence extended its lure, we also made little
breakthroughs
of our own into simply liking humans. I don’t know how it was for you,
and I may be particularly personally insensitive, but I was unable to
see
anything of the humanity involved while watching the moving images on
film,
because I am so used to the moving images telling a story in which the
people killed are simply stage extras, whose thoughts and emotions and
broken families we aren’t expected to consider. It was only when
reading
about the incident in the next day’s papers that the human dimension
managed
to start to break through for me.

And this is the vital thing to understand in any use of the
language
of the satanic. It is a failed transcendence. It fails to grip us
completely.
The unanimity does not last. Even in as strongly religious a society as
the United States. Reasoned discussion starts to break out. Penitent
questions
start being asked. A group of Jews and Catholics went together on the
Friday
after the 11th to a mosque south of Chicago, and circled it, holding
hands,
to protect those within it, throughout their Friday prayers, from any
potential
violence or abuse. The lie does not command absolute respect.
There
are already in our midst outbreaks of truth, of non-possessed humanity.

It is this that I would like to look at with you, as we attempt to
grapple
with contemplation and violence. We were pulled in to a certain sort of
contemplation through the eyes of others on 11th September. We were
pulled
in to a powerful show which taught us to look at the world, ourselves,
and others, in a certain way, one leading to ersatz virtue, fake
communion,
violence and fear. But we have in our midst, and have had for nigh on
two
thousand years, One who is teaching us to look away, so I would like to
try with you to see what it means to learn to look at these things
through
his eyes to see if we can’t discover the deeper meaning which those
apparently
fragmentary outbursts of being human can have.

I submit to you that John 11 is just such a story of "One who is
teaching
us to look away," One who is teaching us to live in the light of the
Resurrection.